That was my plan. But there is an old saying about plans and war. I would have done well to heed it. - Alastair Reynolds

Memo to himself: the one way to make people panic was to warn them not to.

“What happened?”
“Let’s just say my efforts to reprogram the weapon were not an unqualified success, shall we, and leave it at that?” She hated discussing failure almost as much as she hated the thing itself.

Don’t you start. It’s bad enough that one of us feels he could have done more. We’re human, Campion—that’s all it boils down to. Human and not nearly as clever as we thought we were when it counted. End of story. When they put up the gravestone for our species, that’ll be the epitaph.